Sunday morning I was at the Mac shortly after dawn, checked email first: and there were fifty-six So&So liked your post notifications. The program groups email chronologically: the first of them was from 4 AMish. They came in threes: three readers liked Such&SuchaPost, the next three liked Such&SuchaDifferentPost. I noticed no name duplicates, I recognized no names from previous Likes, or from any other kind of correspondence. As I opened a few, I noticed that all checked so far were from the Netherlands!

When a Comment arrives I check out the profile of the person making the Comment. Typically I’ll return a Comment: Thanks for visiting pKnatz, thanks for your comment, and so forth. Sometimes I’ll send an email, commenting on my first impression of them. Sometimes I hear from them again, sometimes I don’t. Here though there were so many that I didn’t, and haven’t yet, visited (more than a couple of) their profiles. What I did though, tears of joy streaming down my cheeks, was reread the posts of mine that had elicited the responses. Boy, some were doozies: anarchist masterpieces. More of the post-approvers proved to be from the Netherlands.

I was in heaven: and I remembered my first contact with colleagues from the Netherlands: In 1970 I founded the Free Learning Exchange. I soon found myself invited to social consciousness meetings in Greenwich Village, those with the consciences turned out to be anarchists. They loved me, I loved them back: at first anyway. But the best meeting ever was one with guests from abroad: anarchists from the Netherlands. If I loved the Village anarchists, despite there being a heavy dose of Marxism mixed amidst some of them, talk about correct interpretations of history (yech!), I really loved the Dutch anarchists! So blond! So beautiful! (So crazy: one of them wanted to distribute musical instruments to the public, a grand piano on the street corner! (Hold on here: pianos aren’t for everyone, you have to have enslaved yourself to any instrument before your playing it is worth a damn!) (And they need a roof! temperature control!) (Singing may be different.) (There was one guy, I can still picture him, the guy giving pianos, whose eyelashes were so blond they looked albino: but spiked! jutted! like pins and needles! Like if you got close to him he’d blind you! Yai! And the pure white blond hairs of his mustache completely curtained his mouth whether opened or closed!)

Anyway I was imagining this Sunday morning that descendants of those Dutch anarchists, maybe one or two of the same Dutch anarchists had found my essays, my insults to society and to human nature, and were freshening their applause. (They couldn’t have been applauding me any harder than I was applauding myself!) By ten AM or so I’d archived about half of the messages: my dial up is slow, and not only had I reread all of my posts responded to, but I’d edited them while there: there’s always a typo or a misspelling that slips past the eye even of a John Milton. But something was funny: one second it said that there were twenty-three unread messages in the Inbox, the next second there were seventy-five!

Ah the Dutch anarchists are having a Sunday morning prayer meeting and their holy text for the day is pk: and now they’re reading a second essay each, or a third, and they’re responding to those too! Their meetings must be longer than a Quaker service! Except that one of the new messages, randomly clicked wasn’t from the Netherlands, it was from Seattle! And new trios from utterly unrecognized sources were flooding in: 85 … 90 … And the same trios of essays were getting duplicated: Counterfeit Claims had three Likes that morning, then it had six, then nine. Ditto Duplicate Judgment, and other Wow-zowie pk posts. But something was funny: I was also getting Likes for minor posts: quotes representing the letter M … little notes, little throat clearings …

And then the responses were from Sweden: Stockholm! Then Russia! And the names! the names were fabulous! (Malahgigitanguay!) But it was the same group of posts again, in trios of approval: sent at 4 AM, at 10 AM and at 2 PM.

Some international anarchist prayer meeting waxed and waned like phases of the moon?

By mid-afternoon I maybe one-hundred-fifty Like responses. No comments, no new subscriptions: Likes. Maybe I’ll make time to visit profiles and perhaps blogs from some of these people, see if I can figure a pattern. Now it’s Tuesday, I haven’t had any since. I hope I do again. Maybe next Sunday!

In 1970 I got letters from all around the world: Australia, Finland … I heard my name mentioned on university campuses were my face wasn’t recognized, by people who had no idea that their subject overheard their reference. But mostly I’ve always just been despised, interrupted before I can complete a sentence: not published, interrupted, misquoted, censored (and jailed!)

How dare Americans (or anyone else) delude themselves that they’re any different from the Romans who crucified Jesus? Or the Christians who castrated Abelard? !

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About pk

Seems to me that some modicum of honesty is requisite to intelligence.
If we look in the mirror and see not kleptocrats but Christians, we’re still in the same old trouble.